It is a serious suggestion. Make it a rule in your league to permit franchise owners to pay each other directly in exchange for swapping players or draft picks. Once approved, there are no ethics concerns because you are playing within your league rules.
Sounds like a horrible idea, which is why that was never a suggestion in the first place.
However, that does sound like how MLB works.
Thank you. That’s the point. Your proposed question is a “horrible idea.” If you don’t like approving a rule allowing compensation on the side for exchanges of players, then don’t do it.
If you have 12 franchises, and 12 owners, even if you were to do an unlimited sequence of 1-for-1 swaps (money involved or not) of owners with respect to the franchises attached to them, there is never any opportunity for one franchise to build itself into a better team. The rosters all stay the same.
No two teams could conspire to try to build up a "superteam".
If you allow individual players or picks to be swapped, then so long as there aren't any outside assets being exchanged, in theory, with sane owners agreeing to the swap, the swap should be relatively fair.
That's called a trade. We all are okay with trades. Here, two teams
could conceivably conspire to build a "superteam", but that would mean they are making one-sided deals to strengthen one team and weaken the other (likely to split the pot if they win ... which, if true, means money is being exchanged after all, conflicting with the premise of this paragraph anyway). This is collusion, and that is why the league looks at trades and might try to stop a trade if it seems like there is likely funny business going on.
But if you allow individual players or picks to be swapped, WITH outside assets being exchanged to "make it worth doing", then the deal is likely inherently unbalanced. Someone is making his team stronger; the other, weaker.
By this means, someone can forcibly build a superteam using cash. This is basically the legalization of collusion. If someone wants a league like that, have at it. But almost no one wants that.
My point is, OP is talking about the first paragraph. You are talking about the third paragraph. Miles apart.